


any illimitable star

by autoclaves



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/F, First Kiss, Fluff, Getting Together, Post-Canon, Romance, space girlfriends space girlfriends space girlfriends !!, very minimal spoilers for s12
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-09
Updated: 2020-04-09
Packaged: 2021-03-01 17:09:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,491
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23560585
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/autoclaves/pseuds/autoclaves
Summary: Yaz sees her from afar at first: the outline of that blue box on the hill next to her flat, and then the Doctor standing in front of it with a hand shading her eyes, looking over the place like she belongs there.(Or: After it all, the Doctor comes back for Yaz.)
Relationships: Thirteenth Doctor/Yasmin Khan
Comments: 8
Kudos: 53





	any illimitable star

**Author's Note:**

> yall know my doctor who dynamic of choice is thoschei but i couldn't get this idea out of my head! yes i'm aware the doctor has So Many Issues and is likely not going to be this carefree for a long time yet, but i wanted space girlfriends so here it is.
> 
> this is shockingly coherent for something written mostly between the hours of 12am-3am and i was too lazy to make more than minimal edits, enjoy xx
> 
> title is from e.e. cummings' poem "love is the every only god"

The Doctor comes back on a Tuesday, a breezy one that is the first truly warm day of the year.

Yaz sees her from afar at first: the outline of that blue box on the hill next to her flat, and then the Doctor standing in front of it with a hand shading her eyes, looking over the place like she belongs there.

She starts running without even consciously thinking about it. “Doctor!” she yells, voice surely wildly distorted over the distance. She doesn’t think it’ll be too much of a problem; the Doctor’s always recognized her when it was important, and nothing is of less importance than this. “ _ Doctor!” _

The figure in the distance spins around. Yaz continues running up the incline of the hill, skittering to a stop just a few feet away from the box, that box of miracles. And from the woman herself, the miracle-bringer.

Said woman flings her arms up in celebration. Her face splits into a wide grin, all teeth and glee. “Yaz! Yasmin Khan! Oh, am I glad to see you!”

Yaz bobs her head mutely, heart in her throat. Now that she’s here, now that she has the other woman in front of her, she doesn’t know what to say. The Doctor is wearing a new coat that flaps behind her, and she’s switched out her old suspenders for even more colorful ones, somehow, but it’s still her. Same face. Same eyes. The same Doctor she’d had to leave on a scorched-earth planet that terrible day.

“C’mon, how’ve you been, Yaz? It’s been a while, hasn’t it? Or—” she frowns and starts counting months off on her fingers, nose scrunched. “Well, it’s been a  _ little _ while. Half of a while, if you will. Longer for me than for you, I reckon. Time travel, y’know? Gets confusing, Yaz.” She spins around on her heel again, seemingly just for the sake of doing so. The wind whips her hair into a mess. “God, I did miss this place, though. Yaz? You okay there?”

Yaz is still standing almost frozen, hands heavy at her sides feeling like an idiot in front of this lovely woman, this force of nature who is blinking at her expectantly with a laugh on her pretty mouth.  _ Say something say something say something— _

“I thought you were  _ dead,  _ Doctor,” she blurts out before she can think of anything better. “We all did, we all thought you’d died on that horrible planet and that we’d just  _ left you—” _

The Doctor’s face crumples for a split second. “Oh, Yaz,” she says. “I got out of there, I always do.”

“I kept hoping,” Yaz whispers, a confession. She had; all those nights, looking up at the sky until she was frozen down to the bone, imagining that the Doctor was still up there. Visiting planets, keeping them all safe. “I thought, she’s pulled off all of these impossible things. She’s saved so many people—what’s one more miracle to save herself?”

And on the worst nights, she’d dreamt about how the Doctor would come back. Land outside Yaz’s house and grin at her in that delightful mad way, offering all of time and space with a flourish of her hand. And then Yaz would board the TARDIS and they’d be off again as if nothing had happened.

The Doctor isn’t grinning anymore. “I’m alive. Promise.” She strides forward and grabs Yaz’s hand, enclosing it between two of her own. Her palm is warm and dry, heated in a way that feels almost feverish. Maybe that’s just how aliens like her run. Hot-blooded. 

“See? I’m right here, Yaz.” 

Yaz sucks in a breath and brings her other hand up so that both of their hands are clinging onto each other now. What a strange picture they must make, two women against a blue sky and blue box, desperate to seek out the smallest point of contact.

—

It’s just her on the TARDIS this time. The Doctor tells her, swinging around the center console flipping switches, that neither Ryan or Graham have decided to return. There’s a story there somewhere, but Yaz doesn’t press. She understands well enough. She’ll have to drop by sometime to visit both of them, if the Doctor ever figures out how to return her to this time without accidentally blowing something up.

It doesn’t stop the first night from being strangely quiet, though. She’s so used to Ryan’s bedroom next to hers, Graham’s shuffling when he inevitably wakes up in the middle of night, their quiet presence anchoring her in this big and almost lonely ship. 

It takes her some time to get to sleep.

The second night, still eerily quiet, Yaz gives up on sleep, slips a hoodie over the Queen t-shirt and sleep pants she’s wearing, and pads out into the hallway in search of the Doctor, or at least maybe a kitchen to make some cocoa in. 

The Doctor isn’t in any of the usual places she favors—console room, engines, viewports, library—and for some reason, both kitchens seem to have disappeared off the grid completely. Yaz aims a scowl in the general direction of the ceiling. Hopefully that’s where the consciousness of the TARDIS lives or something. She’s about to just go back to her room and maybe try cleaning it or something to distract it when a door materializes in front of her. Huh. So maybe the glaring  _ had  _ worked after all. 

Yaz knocks on the door, but doesn’t wait for a reply. If the Doctor didn’t want her in there, the door wouldn’t have appeared at all. Semi-sentient magic ships are useful like that. 

The door swings open easily enough, and Yaz is engulfed in blue light as she walks in.

Inside is a room with a large swimming pool embedded into the middle of it. The lights are a soft fluorescent blue, coloring the water in shades of clearest topaz. It doesn’t smell like chlorine the way swimming pools on Earth do, but there’s a faint tinge of something in the air. Ozone, maybe. It’s not bad at all.

At the far end of the pool, with her trousers hiked up and legs dangling into the water, is the Doctor. She’s sitting perfectly still, looking down at the unbroken surface of the pool seemingly deep in thought. As Yaz approaches, she raises her head and starts to smile.

“Yaz, just the person I wanted to see!” she says, waving her over. “What brings you here?”

“Just wandering. Hope I’m not intruding,” Yaz says. She sits down next to the Doctor, just far enough from the edge that she doesn’t get wet.

“Oh, you’re fine. Come closer, the water isn’t that wet.”

Yaz’s eyebrows shoot up. “The water isn’t that wet? What does that mean? Is this alien water, Doctor?”

“Ah, well, you’ve got me there. It  _ is  _ alien water, mind you. But I suppose it’s just as wet as any other kind of water. Except maybe the kind on the Quinn system.  _ That _ water is drier than the average stuff. But it wouldn’t hurt to give your feet a little splash, either!” The Doctor turns beseeching eyes on Yaz, and because Yaz is a complete pushover, she laughs and starts rolling up her pajama pants. 

“Me, I like coming here to think. The pool’s lovely, and the lighting makes for good atmosphere. Good thinking vibes.” The Doctor continues on, wiggling her legs back and forth. Yaz looks at the pale stretch of them, refracted through the clear water. She can’t quite make herself focus on the Doctor’s face, backlit and almost sleep-soft in a way that hurts to look too closely at.

Yaz pushes herself closer and drops her legs in. It is very nice, as advertised. The water is cool against her skin, and there’s a tickling jet of bubbles emerging from a vent further down. She nudges the Doctor’s calf underwater with her own, and that’s nice, too. “What’re you thinking about, then? Good things, I hope.”

“Oh, very good things,” the Doctor replies. There’s a small smile on her face, a joke that Yaz isn’t privy to. “Thinking about you, actually, Yaz.”

Yaz’s poor, unsuspecting heart jumps. She hides her surprise and makes a small noise of inquiry instead.

“Mhm,” the Doctor says. “You’re brilliant, you really are. I’m glad you’re here with me.”

“You’re the one with the magic box,” Yaz tries to joke. It falls flat.

The Doctor turns her full gaze onto her now. 

“You told me that I was the best person you knew. I’m not really, Yaz. I’ve done a lot of things, I’m not the person you—any of you—I thought I was,” she admits. “But I want to be, for you. You’re just so  _ good. _ So brave, unrelentingly.”

Yaz ducks her head, letting her hair fall loosely forward. The Doctor reaches out, ever so slowly, and pushes it back behind her ear. Her fingers are warm on Yaz’s temple.

“It’ll get me in trouble someday. Bravery mostly means I got a temper, and I’m stubborn.” Yaz’s hands are shaking. She clenches them together in her lap, looking at the Doctor. Her eyes are so kind. 

“Might not get me in trouble today, though,” she says in a rush, and then leans in to kiss her before she can second-guess it.

The Doctor flails a bit, lets out an interesting  _ mmph _ noise, and flutters her hands near Yaz’s hair like she doesn’t know what to do with them. It’s a surprisingly Doctor-like reaction to—well, anything. Yaz pulls away after a long second of frozen indecision on the Doctor’s part. 

“Should I not have done that?”

The Doctor’s eyes are blown wide, and her face is red. She shakes her head almost frantically. “No, I think you should keep doing that.”

And this time the Doctor presses in. Her hands are petting the whole length of Yaz’s hair going up and down, insistent and reaching. Inside the blue-lit room with her legs halfway into what is apparently alien water, Yaz wraps her arms around the warm trembling form of her Doctor, and they kiss. 

—

The next week, she moves her things into the Doctor’s room, which is surprisingly neat and has hidden panels in the walls leading to three different workshops and a kitchen that Yaz has never seen before. (Yaz is indignant. The Doctor spends that day looking either particularly smirky or particularly repentant.) 

They eat together, sleep in the same bed, and the Doctor drags her around the seemingly endless maze of the TARDIS. It’s the most fun Yaz has ever had; she’s ruined for other girls after this. Throughout it all, time runs languidly, somehow all wrung out like it’s being passed through redshift. 

“Temporal distortion mechanism,” the Doctor says sagely when she’s asked about it.

Yaz rolls her eyes. They’re in the biggest kitchen making sandwiches for lunch, or an approximation of it. Again, time passing weirdly. She never knows when it’s lunchtime. “Does that mean the TARDIS is in a strop? Also, that’s not a sandwich.” She points at whatever the Doctor is putting onto her plate.

“It  _ is _ a sandwich! Who’re you, the sandwich police?” The Doctor looks disproportionately indignant at Yaz’s pointing, as if she isn’t  _ stacking whole marshmallows onto a piece of bread. _

“I’m not sure that’s edible.” Yaz takes out the mustard and adds it to the sensible layer of deli meat she has fanned out on her plate. Instead of following her example, the Doctor pouts, puts another slice of white bread on top and shoves the entire creation into her mouth. Yaz hopes she can see the judgement on her face.

“So why is the TARDIS mad?” she presses, not about to be put off her initial line of questioning. 

The Doctor mumbles indistinctly around her mouthful of marshmallows and bread. Mostly marshmallows. 

“That’s your deflecting face. Stop making your deflecting face at me.”

“That was not the deflecting face. I’m making the eating-marshmallows face at you.” The Doctor has somehow finished swallowing all of it and looks none the worse for wear. Yaz wishes she had an insane alien metabolism, too. “You should give my eating-marshmallows face more credit.”

Yaz glares. The Doctor glares back.

“She’s stroppy because she’s getting restless,” the Doctor admits, finally. She pops another marshmallow into her mouth. “She wants to travel, and I’m keeping her here.”

Huh. They hadn’t been going anywhere, sure, but Yaz had assumed it was because of maintenance, or something, not because of a consciously-made decision.

“So why don’t you? Travel, I mean. I could do with some sightseeing,” she asks, fussing with her sandwich. Maybe the Doctor doesn’t want to travel with her—has she been the reason they’re not going anywhere?

The Doctor shrugs. “‘S dangerous. Thought I should lie low and wait for a while before putting myself out there again.”

“You do dangerous all the time! You  _ love _ dangerous, Doctor.” Yaz is incredulous. That can’t possibly be the reason why.

“All right, I’m bloody reckless. I get it!” The Doctor throws her hands up—they’d had this argument, or a variation of it, just yesterday. The Doctor had come to the realization that she had issues with recklessness, à la their most recent incident on Gallifrey. Yaz had come to the realization that she had issues with the Doctor’s recklessness, à la their most recent incident on Gallifrey. It had been an… enlightening time for both them, and then they’d made out in the pool room again.

“I put myself in danger a lot, but that doesn’t mean you have to be in it, too,” she continues, hands gesturing in a way that meant she was nervous.

“I’m an adult, I’d like to think I can make my own informed decisions!”

“I care about you. Yaz, you’re so important. I don’t want you hurt, or unsafe, or—” the Doctor breaks off, staring at Yaz with big pleading eyes. “I  _ care  _ about you.”

There’s a silence that rings hollow around the room after that confession. Yaz softens. “Oh, I know. And you know you’re important to me, too. But I meant what I said, Doctor.” She takes the Doctor’s hand, squeezing it once, twice. “More of the universe and more of you.”

The Doctor’s still looking at her with those eyes, so Yaz leans in and kisses her nose, just to watch her smile.

“It’s my choice, doing the things I do with you. And I know you’ll try to protect me anyway, whether or not I come along.”

The Doctor lifts her arms helplessly. “You’re right, I just… I need you to be safe, alright?”

“And I need  _ you,” _ Yaz tells her. “I really do, I’m hopelessly besotted with you. It’s sickening.”

“Flatterer.”

“Noted.”

“Okay.” The Doctor exhales, and smiles wide as the stars. “Well, then, Yasmin Khan. Do you want to go save a planet with me?” 

**Author's Note:**

> tumblr: @doctortwelfth


End file.
